Six foot tarantula helps spread milk bottle recycling message - 24 September 2009

Raising awareness of the recyclability of plastic milk bottles is crucial to improving collection rates for this valuable material.  Nampak Plastics is always on the look out for examples of companies, schools or individuals who develop novel ways to help spread the positive messages about recycling and a six foot tarantula certainly caught the company’s attention. 

Year 4 pupils from Millbank Primary School in Cardiff were tasked with using some form of used packaging or rubbish to make a sculpture of an animal that is in decline because of the impact of mankind’s behaviour on the planet.  The school has a strong reputation for both its Environmental and Art & Design projects and this particular project helped to combine these two areas. 

The pupils settled on HDPE plastic milk bottles as they are an everyday household item with an environmental message - they are 100% recyclable and can be recycled back into milk bottles creating a closed loop recycling process. 

In the classroom, the pupils were asked to research ideas for the form of the sculpture, make presentations and then vote on what would be the best endangered species to make.  They voted for the Rameshwaram Parachute Spider, which is listed as critically endangered and only 500 are thought to be left in its native India, as its long legs were suited to the stacked plastic milk bottles and of similar colouring.

The pupils brought in plastic milk bottles from home then cut them up into different shapes and sizes before stacking them to form long thin rectangles.  All the pupils had the chance to get involved and produce a different part of the sculpture.  The final sculpture was displayed at a local event to promote the benefits of recycling to members of the community.
James Crick, Business Development Director at Nampak, comments: “This is a great example of schoolchildren using their initiative and creativity to bring recycling to life in the classroom.  We believe that improving young people’s awareness of the need to recycle is very important as they will then have the confidence and knowledge to talk about this at home, educating their own families about their recycling behaviour.”

Lavina (aged 9) said: “We had a lot of fun researching and making the spider. It was the boys who wanted to do a spider at first, but the more we found out about the tarantula, the more we liked them.”

Morgan (aged 9) added: “We have after-school clubs that promote the environment. We try to tell people to ‘choose goods with not too much packaging’, and which are packaged in a material that can be recycled such as HDPE.”

You can see more on the project and the spider on ‘the web’ of course at www.millbankprm.cardiff.sch.uk/gallery/album449?page=1.